Boy player is a common term for the adolescent males employed by Medieval and English Renaissance playing companies. Some boy players worked for the mainstream companies and performed the female roles, as women did not perform on the English stage in this period. Others worked for "children's companies", in which all roles, not just the female ones, were played by boys.
Read more about Boy Player: Boys in Adult Companies, Children's Companies, Responses, Famous Boy Players, In Film, Literature and Theatre
Famous quotes containing the words boy and/or player:
“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)